Kasey Michaels - Lords of Scandal - The Beleaguered Lord Bourne / The Enterprising Lord Edward

How dare he! Jennie thought, incensed. He has taken what had been a beautiful—although, perhaps, in the clear light of hindsight, unfortunate—interlude and turned it into an object of fun. Does he spare my blushes, even a little? He does not. Has he so much as the slightest consideration of my finer feelings? He has not. Does he show the least bit of shame for having taken such elaborate liberties with my person? Far from it. So what does he do? He crashes in here and tries to make a May game out of me, that’s what he does! Her fury getting the better of her, Jennie grabbed hold of her pillow and swung it square at Kit’s head.

“Hey, what’s all that about?” the laughing earl protested, grabbing the fluffy pillow and throwing it to the floor, where his prone body, having been the recipient of Jennie’s none too gentle shove, soon joined it.

“Get out of my chamber!” she ordered, hanging over the edge of the bed, the better to shout at him—a tactical mistake that soon had her body joining his on the rug. “At the risk of understatement, Lord Bourne,” she intoned crushingly, once she had caught the breath her ignominious fall had knocked out of her, “I loathe you!”

It had taken him a while—quite a good while, actually—but at last Kit realized that Jennie wasn’t just putting up a token show of anger. She really meant it—she hated the sight of him. How strange, thought the intelligent, but still rather young Earl of Bourne—so perhaps his confusion was excusable. How very strange. My recollections of last night are far from unpleasant. Surely she couldn’t be finding fault with my performance. After all, I know she has no way of comparing me to another, and even in the heat of the moment I can tell the difference between a cry of distress and a cry of passion. And that was passion last night, sure as check, he assured himself in self-defense.

Perhaps if Kit had been older, had a few more years of exposure to the gentler sex under his belt, he would have realized that Jennie was too shy, too inexperienced, to find any pleasure in verbally rehashing the events of the previous evening. An older man might have handled the “morning after” with a good deal more finesse than had Kit. But Kit was not older or more experienced. And he had bungled his role of loving husband—bungled it badly—and now he would have to pay the piper.

Or would he? As he fought to control Jennie’s flailing limbs without injuring her, Kit slowly began to get angry. What was the chit carrying on about, anyway? he reasoned with typical male logic. It wasn’t as if he had entered her chamber in the middle of the night dressed in next to nothing and hopped into her bed was it? No! And was it he who had cradled her in his arms and shed sweet tears for her? Again, no! And if he reacted in the same way any red-blooded male animal would react when put into the same circumstances, he’d be damned if he’d spend the rest of his life wearing sackcloth and ashes like some dreadful sinner. If there was blame to be placed in this whole business, then let it rest on the head that deserved it—Jennie’s!

“Here now!” he exclaimed, grabbing Jennie by the shoulders and pressing her back against the carpet. “Fun’s fun and all that, kitten, but me thinks thou dost protest too much. After all, it was you who seduced me, y’know.”

“ Me! Seduce you! ” Jennie screeched in disbelief, her body shocked into rigidity. “Well, if that isn’t above all things stupid. You ruin me, and then you have the gall—the absolute gall—to blame me for my own ruination?”

“Ruination, is it?” Kit retorted acidly. “That’s a bit strong, don’t you think, Jennie? After all, we are married. Besides,” he ended, softening a little as his ego surfaced, “it wasn’t all that bad, was it?”

“Oh!” Jennie exploded, rising to her feet to brush her tangled gold locks out of her eyes. “The conceit of the man!” Dramatically pointing toward the door, she pronounced regally, “Get out, my lord, or I shall tell you just how bad things could really become if I put my mind to it, sirrah!”

Kit took in Jennie’s thunderous expression, mentally complimenting the accuracy of his memory when it was applied to his recollections of the sweet curves hardly concealed by her thin nightgown, and slowly got to his feet. “All right, puss, I’ll leave. But try as you might, my dear, last night did happen, and it happened because you came into my chamber, not through any fault of my own.”

“I only entered your chamber because of your nightmare,” Jennie protested weakly, hating to see any logic in Kit’s statement.

“Perhaps. And, if I have not mentioned it before, I do now thank you, kitten,” he said, sobering for a moment. “But you stayed to comfort me after I awoke, didn’t you?” he pointed out, driving his point home with a vengeance. “How dare you stand there and tell me I’m a cad just because I took what was offered me!”

“Well,” Jennie returned, determined to brazen it out, “how dare you be angry with me for having the audacity to be angry with you! ”

That piece of feminine reasoning was beyond Kit, and he belatedly saw the wisdom in returning to his own chamber before things became so muddled that Jennie ran home to her father in a pet. He had enough on his plate without that! Left alone, Jennie might eventually see their unplanned lovemaking in a more charitable light, and him along with it. Not that he would pine away to nothingness if she never shared his bed again, but damn it all anyway, he had rather enjoyed her company, even if she hadn’t been the bride of his choice.

Left alone once more, Jennie launched her body onto the bed and indulged herself in a cleansing bout of tears which settled absolutely nothing, but at least kept Goldie and Bundy from asking too many questions.

HIS MASTER WAS in a fine temper this morning, Leon mused placidly as he deftly caught the spoiled cravat that went winging past his shoulder and handed his lordship a fresh one. That it had something to do with the young countess Leon was certain, but since Renfrew, that old stickler for propriety, had pulled him away from the door last night, Leon was left to ponder whether or not the rumpled state of the bed had anything to do with it. It was unusual for his old major to keep anything from him, Leon having served as his batman in Spain, but the servant instinctively knew that he was not soon to become privy to this latest secret.

His toilette having suffered sadly for his haste, Kit left his valet to straighten the mess his dressing room had become and slammed out of his chamber, intent on quitting the mansion without breakfast and heading for the nearest club that saw nothing wrong with a purely liquid breakfast. Grabbing the stair rail, Kit swung himself onto the stairs and pelted toward the foyer, only to be stopped in his tracks by a reedy cockney voice exclaiming: “Coo, Del, wouldya clap yer glims on the fine gentry mort! Puss like a thundercloud ‘e’s got. ‘ang me fer a bachelor’s sprig iffen it ain’t the arl ’imself.”

The object of this speech inclined his head and took in the sight of three banty-legged creatures dressed in Wilde livery standing at some semblance of attention near the wide front door. He knew what they were supposed to be, they were supposed to be footmen, but they looked for all the world to be escapees from Newgate—low toby men who made their living by picking pockets and breaking into people’s houses. Another example of my wife’s discerning judgment of character, he decided angrily. But these three cutpurses make Goliath and Tiny look like the cream of the crop! Forcing his feet to carry him closer, he stopped on the bottom step and introduced himself.